Radio-telescope product line automated sales configurator case study

CONTEXT

A world-leader radio-telescope manufacturer has made a significant evolution from full-custom systems to product line over a range of systems to address export growth.

However, after 2 years the company is facing several issues:

Reuse benefits are not present
Product perimeter is unclear
Many on-site quality issues impairing business model

OUR APPROACH

Here are the 3 main phases that we followed:

Identification of issue root cause : Sellers do not sell the product line. Implementation of a simple & trans-disciplinary feature model that models customer needs variability and allows to automatically configure product line assets :

H/W building blocks
S/W parameters
Documentation, contracts
Requirements docs
Test protocols, …

Feature model also provided a common language to drastically improve sales & engineering collaboration and align processes,

Implementation of a product line governance having authority over projects and engineering disciplines,

CREATED VALUE

Drastic reduction of variant generation time from ~200 days to 4 days (-98% !) and associated engineering effort.
Eradication of on-site quality issues & improvement of reliability.
Less stress on critical resources.

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